During the Covid closures in England, the retired academic Peter Conrad found a means of self-care: “Others got through the pandemic by adopting puppies; my solution to the contagious jitters was to re-read Dickens.” A solution for the long haul indeed: Dickens wrote fifteen novels, a bunch of novellas and short stories, a handful of plays and dramatic adaptations, lots of journalism and commentary, and 14,000 letters. Conrad found his course of Dickens therapeutic: “At the start I only wanted the books to quieten my nerves and occupy my idleness, but . . . they also reinvigorated me, getting my head if not my legs out of the house.” From the height of his lofty reading, borrowing Dickens’ own image of a “pilot balloon,” Conrad christens the imaginative world he looked out on “Planet Dick.” Consciously or not, Conrad believes, Dickens, from “the turbulence of his creative brain,” “created or recreated life on a planetary scale.”
In Dickens the Enchanter, the book he has compiled from his experience, Conrad has marshaled an impressive command of Planet Dick.[1] Conrad recalls encountering Dickens as a child in Tasmania, first through the black-and-white David Lean films of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), and later through the novels themselves. Even then Dickens was, for Conrad, the “enchanter” of his title, offering “new ways to see the world, or glimpses of worlds that were too far away for me to see.” And not merely the world of England, far from his “bright, bland suburb,” but a world of “enticing darkness.” Dickens, refracted through Lean, was terrifying. He recalls,
A pregnant woman hauls herself across a dark moor in a thunderstorm, past bare twitching trees and thorns like barbed wire; a boy runs through a stagnant marsh beneath gibbets with dangling nooses and enters a churchyard where the gravestones tilt on humped mounds, as if the interred bodies were struggling back to the surface.
Terrifying—and enthralling. Throughout his career, Conrad has often written on mythic recurrence and celebrity, taking in both high culture like opera and the popular culture of Hollywood and television. Although Dickens was not one of his chief academic interests, I wonder if the gaslit flicker of Dickens isn’t the source of some of Conrad’s own professional compulsions.
Dickens the Enchanter, encyclopedic but unmethodical in scope, is clearly the work of a fan. Conrad organizes his observations under various heads, such as bizarre verbal coinages, allusions to devils, or exotic details springing from Dickens’ love of The Arabian Nights. The most successful chapters to my mind are the few that settle into a topic, usually grounded in the narrative of Dickens’ life. For example, the chapter entitled “Heroes of His Own Life” coheres and develops as Conrad works his way through David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61), the two novels that probably owe the most to the autobiographical facts Dickens went to considerable trouble to conceal during his life and yet ensured, by enlisting the help of his friend John Forster, would be revealed after his death. Having a prefabricated thread to follow, as opposed to spinning out his own, keeps Conrad on track.
Occasionally Conrad offers explicit interpretation. Jo, in Bleak House, is one of the most poignant waifs in Dickens’ large cast of mistreated and abandoned children. On his deathbed, he gratefully mumbles, “I’m more cumfbler nor you can’t think.” Conrad’s sensitive reading of “cumfbler”: “The consonants bump into each other almost unpronounceably, perhaps because Jo has no breath left for intervening vowels or for extra syllables: this is a word he has not tried to say before, because comfort is something he has never previously felt.”
Most of the time, however, Conrad riffs. Thus: He lays down Henry James’s description of the “house of fiction” (“The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”), and then he takes off into the literal houses of Dickens’ fictions. He describes the bolts and nails of some of Dickens’ locked rooms like the one where Fagin imprisoned Oliver Twist and the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit entrapped himself. I enjoyed Conrad’s flights in reconstituting James’s symbolic house into hyper-specifically literal parts even though, of course, none of it was in Dickens’ mind since James’s phrase comes from the 1908 New York edition’s preface to A Portrait of a Lady (1881), years after Dickens’ death in 1870. Similarly, Conrad is free to take Jonas’ room as “a parable about the insurgency of imagination,” with the caveat that it’s his parable, not Dickens’.
And the riffs compound. Rare is the paragraph that doesn’t contain citations from at least three works. Here’s an ad lib from a larger section comparing Dickens’ method to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. It appeared between 1830 and 1833, the same year the twenty-one-year-old Dickens’ first writing appeared in print (a short story called “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”) and was so much talked about then and later that Dickens must have known about it. Still, I am virtually certain that Dickens did not conceive of his work as a “world” either inspired by or analogous to Lyell’s work; the parallels lie in Conrad’s associative mind. The previous paragraph was about the power of water to shape the earth; now Conrad turns to fire:
Looked at in another way, the world seems scarily flammable. Durdles in Edwin Drood lights his lantern by striking “a spark of that mysterious fire which lurks in everything” from a cold hard wall; Grewgious in the same novel is grateful that fire-proofed stairs in a London hotel offer protection from “the devouring element.” Even the festal pudding in A Christmas Carol brings an incendiary threat to the table: it gives off “a great deal of steam,” which clears to reveal “a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy.” A Child’s History of England contains an excited account of the Great Fire of London in 1666, with showers of hot ash, houses crumbling to cinders, and flames that made night brighter than day. Dickens himself joked about being a one-man conflagration, and in 1841 he toyed with a scheme to tantalise his readers by taking a year off, after which he would deliver a three-volume novel and “put the town in a blaze again.”
Every single item in this paragraph has fire in it, but otherwise what holds them together? Are they even all, as Conrad claims in his topic sentence, scary? I find the Cratchits’ Christmas pudding and Dickens’ joke about his popularity rather larky with that slightly belabored Victorian humor. I bet children would enjoy Dickens’ fiery description of the Great Fire, and the two examples from Edwin Drood don’t strike me as scary either—a momentary attempt at profundity, perhaps. So that’s nil out of five on the scary quotient for me.
There’s a vertiginous virtuosity here, but did the rarefied atmosphere high above Planet Dick go to Conrad’s head? Even he admits that, while at first his project seemed benign, even curative, “the diversion soon turned into a compulsion.” A lot of this book seems feverish and fever-inducing. I began to question my readerly sanity in the course of reading Conrad’s book. Why was I finding it increasingly infuriating and pointless? Was it the heat of Manhattan? Fever from a summer cold? Was it better if I read in a chair designed for concentration at a desk or tried to go with the flow in the hammock? First thing in the morning over coffee? At night with wine? Caught in the slurry of Conrad’s avalanche of minutia, inevitably I remembered Evelyn Waugh’s short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens,” condemned to read nothing but Dickens out loud, over and over, forever. But was it Conrad’s fault or mine? We all have our professional deformations, and my lifetime includes significant stints writing expository prose, working through geometric proofs and philosophical arguments, teaching logic and rhetoric, and explaining ideas in a clear linear fashion to classrooms of teenagers. Have I become a Gradgrind?
It turns out it’s not just me. This Pelion-on-Ossa style is in Conrad’s DNA. In 1988, the musicologist Winton Dean, exasperated, thought Conrad treated opera “as a launching-point for self-indulgent fantasies, portentous abstractions, forced antitheses and festoons of verbiage which on being unravelled yield either a platitude or a nonsense.” Even further back, in a 1980 London Review of Books essay on one of Conrad’s books that included a chapter on Dickens in America, a coruscatingly frustrated Richard Poirier was harsher: “He is anxious always to be dazzling, outrageous, ‘brilliant’ in adducing connections. The sentences move with a metronomic regularity never deflected by recalcitrant textual or historical evidence, and lest we choose to look at any of the works from which he takes his many quotations, he is careful not to supply page references, bibliography or even the exact date of letters.”
Poirier attacked Conrad’s accuracy, academic transparency, and argument. Dickens the Enchanter has no pretensions to scholarship, so I found the absence of notes understandable and thus less irksome—all the allusions to Henry James and Charles Lyell and so forth presumably came out of Conrad’s well-stocked memory. Google helped me find almost all of what I wanted to learn more about. And I can’t find fault with his argument, because this book doesn’t have one beyond the claim that Dickens is terrific. We all have our personal as well as professional deformations, and Dickens above all authors celebrates individual quirks. Conrad’s cast of mind is observant, connective, surging, and overflowing. What it is not is explanatory. Conrad has enchanted himself with Dickens during lockdown, had fun listing his favorite bits, and got an eminent publishing house to print it. Lucky him. If you love the sound of this, lucky you.
There’s an argument to be made—and I thought of making it—that Conrad is taking Dionysian inspiration from Dickens himself and writing mimetically. One of the traits he admires is that “In art, Dickens loved mayhem and uproar, pandemonium and topsy-turvydom.” In this regard Conrad contrasts Dickens-the-artist with Dickens-the-man, who was, he says somewhat disparagingly, “a stickler for discipline.” While I agree that Dickens often loved describing “pandemonium and topsy-turvydom,” I do not find his own writing to be disorganized or undisciplined. There’s that old canard that Dickens’ novels are so long because he got paid by the word, but his surviving rough drafts show his craftsmanship in many edits, cross-outs, and cancelled passages. Similarly, Dickens shaped his capacious and grab-baggy observations with an orderly intellect throughout his work, even in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. In 1836 he was hired on spec to provide a picaresque narrative for someone else’s comic illustrations; he began work in an ad hoc and slapdash way, but, by the time he finished a year and a half later, he had pulled together his huge cast of characters into an artful and morally deepened universe. Mr. Pickwick no longer skates on the surface of his world as an observer, however sympathetic, of the “quaint and curious” phenomena around him. The change in him is not because he is imprisoned for breach of promise by his comically mistaken landlady Mrs. Bardell, but because in later saving Mrs. Bardell, he saves himself. Ultimately Mr. Pickwick is not merely a member of a cliquish club but part of a common humanity.
Dickens’ interest in what we have in common—he wasn’t dubbed Mr. Popular Sentiment by Trollope for nothing—runs through his fiction to the end. He expressed it in many different symbolic forms, from Christmas to, appropriately for reading him during Covid, disease. Dickens had plenty of literal diseases—typhus, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, malaria—to draw from, but it was the idea of infection itself that attracted him as he turned real disease into metaphors for moral malaise.
For example, Conrad, ruminating on lockdowns, cites a snippet on the “viral credulity” of investors in Little Dorrit (1855–57), but he could have quoted the whole passage from the chapter Dickens entitled “The Progress of an Epidemic”:
That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere. A blessing beyond appreciation would be conferred upon mankind, if the tainted, in whose weakness or wickedness these virulent disorders are bred, could be instantly seized and placed in close confinement (not to say summarily smothered) before the poison is communicable.
Dickens’ first monster sentence here is not piling on appositives or spewing forth the disiecta membra of his reading; rather, it is putting forth the terms of an argument in interdependent logical clauses that end with a reminder of a literal fact while hinting at a figurative meaning beyond it. Dickens wrote this chapter recommending forceable quarantine for moral infection (with what I hope is merely a hyperbolic recommendation of smothering patients) just a few months after he had received a letter from a doctor he knew who reported that Boulogne, Dickens’ chosen summer holiday spot, was experiencing an outbreak of diphtheria. Dickens immediately sent his wife and six of his sons home.
By the time Dickens wrote Little Dorrit he had already inflicted innumerable characters with diseases, but, as I would like to argue, with a purpose. His masterpiece on the theme is Bleak House (1852–53), almost 1,000 pages in my Penguin edition. Yet, although Henry James might disagree, it is no loose, baggy monster. Dickens artfully constructs his novel around the subject of a society riddled with moral disease. His theme casts its shadow on the first page laying out the weather in a sequence of bravura sentence fragments: “a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes” suggests a world that has “gone into mourning . . . for the death of the sun.” The people on whom the soot is falling, however, are not united in mourning, but rather clash in “a general infection of ill temper.” There is a topsy-turvydom here—what should be white is black—but it’s not a random flip for laughs. This world is badly upside down, and the condition could prove fatal.
Still, how is Dickens going to keep this theme going for 67 chapters over nineteen months? One important teacher was Thomas Carlyle. His French Revolution (1837; rev. 1857) inspired Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859); he also dedicated Hard Times (1857) to him. Carlyle was perhaps the pre-eminent model for Dickens in how to interpret the phenomena of real life in a symbolic way to strike to the heart. All the way back in 1843, when Dickens was about to write A Christmas Carol, Carlyle took a sadly ordinary event and turned it into a parable. In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle repeated a report from Edinburgh that no charitable institution would admit an Irish widow and her three children who were suffering from typhus. They all died—and so did seventeen other more respectable people who caught the infection from them. Thus admonishes Carlyle:
The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, “Behold I am sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone of your bone; one God made us: ye must help me!” They answer, “No, impossible; thou art no sister of ours.” But she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had human creature ever to go lower for a proof? . . . Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof that she was flesh of your flesh; and perhaps some of the living may lay it to heart.
Dickens learned a lot from this passage that he applied to Bleak House. As we’ll see, he borrows Carlyle’s method of drawing on the newspapers and government reports. He also borrows the language of the preacher and the pulpit and the form of a contemporary parable. (From his own experience as a reporter in court, he also adapts the language of advocate and judge, the law being another moral theme in the novel.) Above all, Dickens took to heart Carlyle’s both literal and symbolic understanding of “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”: contagion proves the whole world kin.
Analogous to Carlyle’s Irish widow is Jo, the novel’s lowliest character. Of all the Londoners in that opening scene of pollution, he has the most practical attempt at a solution: a broom. He proves to be the key to unlock the novel’s many mysteries from the identity of Nemo to Lady Dedlock’s secret. He also might prove to be the key to a larger mystery facing all of us: “His whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all.” When these words appear, Jo’s death is 500 pages off, so when Dickens’ narrator says Jo’s death is “the strangest thing of all,” he is referring to Jo’s incapacity to understand whatever his own death will mean, surely a universal concern. Although Dickens invests Jo with the heaviest symbolic weight, he is grounded in reality. In 1850, Dickens read the testimony of a real crossing sweeper named George Ruby who shocked a judge when the court discovered that he couldn’t read, didn’t know what the Bible was, and didn’t even know what prayers were. All he knew was how to sweep mud and muck for other people to cross the road without getting their feet too dirty: “That’s all. I sweeps the crossing.” The judge refused to accept George Ruby as a witness. A few years later, Dickens, who might in fact have written anonymously about George Ruby at the time, puts some of George Ruby’s words directly in the mouth of his crossing sweeper, Jo.
When Jo appears in the novel, the narrator often comments on him in the iambic King James cadences and idiom Carlyle also used: “Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish.” The heightened language ironically underscores Jo’s lowliness, of course, but it also brings home Jo’s homelessness to the people who ignore his filth, grime, parasites, sores, and rags.
And when Jo, made “more cumfbler” by the novel’s noble physician, dies, the narrator moves into the explicit condemnation of the courtroom: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.” As with the Irish widow, ignore Jo at your peril.
How do you cure a moral pandemic? In this instance, Dickens is no enchanter. There is no magic wand. He ends his book on another sentence fragment in the voice of Esther Summerson, the other character associated with a broom, although in her case it is merely figurative. She has spent the novel trying to heal infected hearts. Orphaned (as she thinks) like Jo and psychologically rather than physically abused like Jo, she has, unlike him, been able to make a loving home with a rich patron, that noble doctor, and various waifs and strays she has helped rehabilitate. But Dickens’ prospect is bleaker than even the dour Carlyle’s. It is not the unkindness that faced the Irish widow, but kindness that kills. The disease-carrying Jo infects Esther and her orphaned maid who tended him; Esther’s reward is to be permanently defaced by smallpox.
Disease, whether literal or symbolic, is not the only thread running through Bleak House and holding it together. Whereas Conrad’s Dickens—Dickens the Enchanter—seems to me almost a carnival conjuror, all flash and talk, I believe Dickens’ enchantment is meant to do more than merely entertain, astonish, or mystify. When Dickens used his artful godlike powers to call Planet Dick into being, he benevolently created a world we could also make sense of. And I do mean a true, non-solipsistic “we.”
When the fog of Covid closed in, Connecticut ordered all schools shut for two weeks. I found some Penguin copies of David Copperfield in a school cupboard and shoved them into the hands of my juniors on their way out of the building. With everyone stuck at home, with no commute or afterschool activities, with school closures extended, and extended again, with no lesson plans or agenda or grand themes, no reading comprehension quizzes or essays, without even a schedule of readings, we hunkered down to read.
Twice a week we met online in our Hollywood Squares Zoom array. We’d been together in our seminar since September and pretty quickly figured out the mechanical ways to manage a decent discussion, but I really wasn’t sure what they’d make of David Copperfield. They were pretty sophisticated readers—we’d read Paradise Lost in the fall—and I wondered if David would seem too childish or unsophisticated to them. I had also wondered if I might find my time in the novel a bit childish. After all, I was a lover of late, dark Dickens. But under these oddly intimate shared circumstances, David fit right in. As David was born and went off to school, we were seeing each other in bedrooms with stuffed animals on the pillow and a guitar on the wall; we talked about David’s experiments with oysters and dinner parties with Dora against a backdrop of someone’s kitchen with families puttering in the background. Occasionally we’d be flashed by a pet or a bediapered sibling. As the weather improved and David’s life didn’t, the scenes moved outside to backyards and the sounds of birds and lawn mowers.
Outside the sterility of the classroom, we had permission to see ourselves whole, and perhaps the characters too. For what we naturally wanted to talk about was the characters—how cruel Mr. Murdstone was, the charm of the Peggottys in their upturned boat house, the sliminess of Uriah Heep. Dora they found increasingly tiresome, but most honestly admired Agnes. Everyone saw through Steerforth.
I wasn’t surprised at our shared pleasure in Mr. Micawber’s linguistic flights, but I was surprised at how heartwarming one student found Mrs. Micawber’s faith in her husband; another thought she’d never read anything as hilarious as Aunt Betsey’s battles with the donkeys. Life includes periods of tedium, too, and no one wished David’s journeying through the Alps longer than it was. Despite our strange virtual medium, Dickens linked us through the fundamental compulsion to find out what happened next—and it did become a compulsive rhythm: one student who had been absent the day I handed out the book read all of David Copperfield on her phone.
Read in this way, Dickens’ virtuosity was not just visible, but approachable; the characters weren’t merely entertaining, but, a bit to my surprise, registered with my students as psychologically believable (including the donkeys). We naturally noticed echoes and took pleasure in sharing our favorite bits. The lesson of this experience for me was Dickens’ continued power to shape a community of readers. We had serious fun.
This experience was a one-off—David Copperfield is too long to lend itself to normal high school teaching, and I devoutly hope we’re never quarantined again. Depressing news since Covid includes a 2024 study called “They Don’t Read Very Well,” which reports that only 5 percent of college English majors “had a detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House.” My former students are now at the end of college or even beginning their entry into our odd job market. Will they go on to read Dickens for fun? Is Dickens a prophylactic for an intellectual or spiritual pandemic? The results of Conrad’s solitary course of Dickens and my experience in herd immunity are not yet in. But I hope so.
[1] DICKENS THE ENCHANTER: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller, by Peter Conrad. Bloomsbury Continuum. $30.00.
